The Other Us

by Fiona Harper

  I turn to look at Dan. ‘What? You didn’t mention this! Are you having a big swanky party filled with celebrities and everything?’

  Dan just laughs. ‘Hardly. We’re doing something at the bookshop in Swanham, organising it all ourselves. Well, I say “ourselves” but it’s Mrs Lewis here that’s the driving force behind it.’

  ‘You will come, won’t you?’ Becca says, looking hopefully at me, then Jude.

  ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world!’ I say. ‘My best ever chance to hob nob with a famous author …’

  Dan rolls his eyes and looks off down the garden. Jude nods, but is saved from responding when there’s a shriek of pain from the lawn.

  I start running even before I see what’s happened. Chloe is lying on the grass. She begins to move, sits up, opens her mouth and wails. She’s OK, I think as I race down the stairs to the lawn. She’s moving, she’s breathing. I just need to get to her…

  But then I am overtaken by Becca as she sprints past me. It’s Becca who scoops her up, Becca who shushes her and strokes her hair. My fingers itch to do the same. The fact that I can’t be first in that race ever again hits me like a punch in the chest. I heave in a ragged breath and walk over to where Becca is trying to distract Chloe. I’ve seen enough pre-schooler tumbles to know the upset is more down to the shock of finding herself flying towards the grass than real injury.

  Becca is facing away from me, swaying gently as she coos to her daughter, and I can see Chloe’s head over the top of her shoulder. There are gluey tears at the corner of her eyes and she’s sniffing intermittently. ‘Are you OK, sweetie?’ I ask, but Chloe doesn’t answer. She hides her face in her mother’s neck, shuts out the sight of me. I decide I have something I need to check on in the kitchen urgently.

  I don’t know what I say to Dan, who is heading down from the deck, as I breeze past him. Something about fillet steak, I believe. It’s only when I’m standing in front of the open refrigerator, cold air blasting my face, that I manage to breathe properly again.

  This isn’t healthy, I think to myself. But what are the options? Never see Chloe – or Dan or Becca – again? That’s ridiculous! I’m just going to have to find a way of making myself some boundaries. That’s the sensible thing to do for all of us.

  I pick up a pitcher of homemade lemonade that’s sitting in the front of the fridge, place it on a tray and add some glasses. Time to eat, I think. That should keep us all out of trouble.

  As dinner progresses I notice Jude hardly interacts with Chloe at all. He winces when she gets so excited about having her burger that she serenades it at the top of her voice, making up a special ‘burger song’ before she chomps into it, laughing. When a bit of carrot flies in his direction then slides under the table he looks affronted.

  I take it personally. How dare he brush her off, not even make an effort? It causes me to wonder if I slid into another reality, one where Chloe was Sophie and Sophie was still mine, would Jude be as rude to her? Would he be like this with our child?

  And with that last thought, my anger turns to sadness. Maybe there’s a very good reason God or fate or whoever deals with these things hasn’t given me a child in this life. I feel the hope I’ve been trying to hang onto shrivel up until it looks like the dried cranberries in the rice salad.

  I stand up. They all look at me. I invent an excuse to go into the kitchen again, which is quickly becoming my place of sanctuary, and when I get there I busy myself getting the meringue roulade out of the fridge, shoving it on a plate and mounding fresh berries around it.

  I hear a noise behind me and I turn. I hope it might be Jude coming to check on me, but it’s Dan standing there, an empty wine glass in his hand. ‘Can I get Becca a refill?’ he asks and we smile at each other. We both know Becca won’t fetch her own wine if she can get someone else to do it for her.

  ‘Sure,’ I say, and pull a bottle of white from the fridge and fill the glass. I expect him to go back outside, but instead he stands there, looking at me.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  I feel my eyes fill. I nod.

  ‘You’re not,’ he says, and the kindness in his eyes is my undoing. ‘What’s wrong?’

  I shrug. Where do I even begin? All the things Dan and I have been through together swirl round my head, but I can’t talk about any of them. In this life all we ever were was a romantic blip, a red herring before he found Becca.

  ‘Honestly?’

  I realise I’ve spent too long holding it all back and that even though I can’t tell Dan the whole truth, I can tell him the thing that’s been buzzing round my head like a bluebottle these past few months.

  ‘Yes, honestly,’ he replies. ‘We’re friends, Maggie. Have been for a long time.’ He reaches out and touches my bare arm, gives it a reassuring pat that should be awkward but somehow isn’t. ‘You can tell me anything.’

  Not anything, I think, but maybe this.

  I look down at the ring on my left hand. ‘It’s been a long time since Jude proposed to me, and we don’t seem any closer to tying the knot. I suppose I’m worried he doesn’t want to marry me anymore.’

  ‘But you always said you were both so busy, that you’d prefer to wait for the time to be right rather than do it in a rush. Wasn’t there a waiting list for that castle you wanted for the reception?’

  I nod. ‘There was. But if we’d booked in the couple of months after we got engaged, we’d married by now. I said those things because that’s what you do when you’re with someone, don’t you? You back them up. You make the excuses, either because you really believe they’re going to come through eventually, or because you’ve got their back.’

  Dan gives me a look that tells me he understands.

  ‘So there we have it,’ I say. ‘I think maybe I’m just not marriage material.’ And I mean this in more than the way Dan thinks I do. I mean that even when I am married I’m not sure I’m very good at it. It’s taken me almost three lifetimes to realise how selfish I can be.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he says, laughing my words off. ‘Of course you have what it takes! You’re talented and creative and kind. You’re the sort of person who gives to others – I’ve seen the way you are with Jude. Let’s be honest, I haven’t always been his biggest fan, but you bring out the best in him. He’d be crazy not to want to marry you.’

  ‘Really? You mean all of that?’

  He smiles at me, that specifically ‘Dan’ smile, the one where he tips his head a little to the side and his eyes shine. ‘Of course. I almost married you myself, didn’t I? You can’t be that bad!’

  I know it’s a joke, designed to make me laugh, but it reminds me of that day on the river when he asked me, the way his face looked when I told him I had to think about it, and then the conversation I overheard between him and Becca the night of that horrible dinner party.

  I smile back at him. ‘It was probably better we didn’t. I don’t think I was right for you.’

  I realise, in the arbitrary phrasing of my words that I’ve hit upon the real truth. I thought it was all Dan’s fault the first time around, but a lot of the blame rested with me.

  Dan thinks over what I’ve said. He stares into his wife’s wine glass for a moment, then looks up at me. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ he says. ‘In another life, I think we could have been really happy.’

  My nose stings and I nod. ‘In another life …’

  We’re looking at each other, smiling, and then something shifts. It’s as if the varnish of friendship, the shell that has kept us safe from the feelings we once had for each other has dissolved. When I look at Dan I don’t see my best friend’s husband; I see the man I once loved, I once shared my life with. The scary thing is that I know he’s looking at me the same way, and there’s a sudden jolt of connection between us.

  I step back before he does. I break eye contact and nod towards the glass he’s holding in his hands. ‘You’d better get that back out there,’ I say and my smile stretches my cheeks uncomfort
ably. ‘You know how Becca hates warm wine …’

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Dan’s book launch is on the Wednesday of the October half-term. I wanted Jude to come with me to be my anchor, something tangible and solid to help me remember which life I’ve chosen, but he says he’s too busy. We planned a holiday together after that talk we had the other week, a trip to Moorea, somewhere tropical and romantic, and he says he has too many deals to close before we leave, so I go on my own.

  It’s raining hard when I arrive at the bookshop so I scuttle inside. I’m twenty minutes late. I planned to be. I thought it would be easier if the place was full of people already, if it wasn’t just me Dan, Becca and the bookshop owner standing around, watching the door.

  I know he’s seen me the moment I step inside. Ever since the barbecue back in the summer it’s been there, an awareness. I know he feels it too. I also know we both dance around the edges, keeping our distance. I wave and smile to Dan, but it’s Becca I make eye contact with. It doesn’t help the humming feeling that courses through me, though. Not one bit. If anything, it makes it worse.

  It’s an echo, I tell myself. That’s all. And even if it isn’t, that’s all it can ever be.

  I stand at the back when it begins. Dan’s editor speaks and then Dan reads a bit from the first chapter. There are a lot of pre-teens here, dragged along by their parents. By the end of the reading, they’ve lost their world-weary looks and they’re leaning forward. When the formal bit is over, they swarm round Dan, eager to get a signed copy. I know it’s going to be a while before I can sidle up and offer my congratulations, so I wander off to find Becca. The bookshop is quite small, and when the crowd gathered for the reading it was too packed to make my way over to her.

  ‘He’s got real talent,’ I say as we smile and watch him talking to a boy, aged around eleven, who gets his mum to take a picture of them both together on her mobile phone.

  Becca turns to me. ‘Jude couldn’t make it then?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘What a shocker,’ she mutters.

  ‘You still don’t like him much, do you?’ I ask Becca, but I’m not angry. I think I’ve come round to the fact that this is as good as it’s going to get between them.

  Becca looks as if she doesn’t want to say anything. ‘He’s just not my cup of tea,’ she eventually replies.

  I consider letting her off the hook, but we’ve never been able to have a calm conversation about Jude, and now I’ve got the chance I don’t want to waste it. ‘I just want to understand.’

  She gives me a long, hard look and I know her brain is working. I respect the fact she’s thinking her answer through instead of blurting it out, that she’s tempering her words for my sake. ‘I always used to think he was trying to be something he wasn’t,’ she says, ‘with his fake accent and his posh friends. It’s as if the rest of us weren’t good enough for him. I dunno … Suppose I always thought he was a bit fake.’

  I nod. I’ve always known he was like that. Not fake, really, but he dressed for the part he wanted. ‘But he’s not faking now,’ I say carefully. ‘He’s a successful man, one who’s worked hard to get where he is.’

  Becca nods reluctantly. ‘I know, he proved me wrong there.’ She laughs. ‘I always thought he was all mouth and no trousers.’

  I laugh too. It’s nice to be able to talk about this sensibly, even if we don’t see eye to eye, but then I get serious again. ‘You still don’t like him, though. Why?’

  She sends me a pleading look, but I wait.

  ‘You don’t want to know the truth,’ she says.

  A shiver runs through me. I have a feeling she might be right, but I also know that if we don’t talk this out at some point it’s always going to be a ‘thing’ between us, the elephant in the room. ‘I think I need to,’ I reply.

  ‘I was afraid you were going to say that. Hang on.’ She motions for one of the helpers – the young, toned PE teacher I’d thought he’d been having an affair with in another life, ironically – to grab another couple of glasses of wine, then hands one to me.

  I look down at my glass. ‘That bad, huh?’ I say, sounding much more light-hearted than I actually feel.

  ‘Always a good idea in sticky situations,’ she says grimly.

  I take a slug. ‘OK,’ I say, ‘hit me with it.’

  She shifts from foot to foot, fixes her gaze on a bookshelf on the other side of the room. ‘You remember you didn’t go to the Christmas Ball in our second year at Oaklands and I did?’

  I nod. Jude had only broken up with me a fortnight before. I really hadn’t been in the mood.

  ‘Well, I went, didn’t I?’ Becca takes a large, fortifying slurp of wine. ‘And so did he.’

  My stomach goes cold at her words and I’m sure all the blood has drained from my face.

  Becca looks uncomfortable but she carries on. Now the lid is off, it’s all spilling out and I don’t think she can stop. ‘He’d had a few beers, I know that, but I was standing on my own at one point and he came over, draped his arm around my shoulders and said something about what a pity it was we hadn’t got to know each other better.’

  I know what she’s implying; I can see it in her eyes. ‘Maybe he was just being friendly?’ I suggest weakly.

  She shakes her head. ‘But it was such a long time ago,’ she says, then carries on quickly: ‘I just told him to take a hike and he laughed and went back to his friends. He’s never done anything like that since – I want you to know that! It was just after that … well, it was a bit hard to warm to him. I’m not good at forgiving people when they’ve crossed me, and I’m even worse if they do it to someone I love.’

  She looks so pained I lean in and give her a hug. ‘Thank you for telling me,’ I say quietly. ‘That can’t have been easy.’

  I get it now, why Becca won’t ever like Jude. Her fierce loyalty to me forbids it. I don’t have it in me to be the slightest bit cross with her. In fact, knowing that ‘the Queen of TMI’ has kept this secret to protect me all these years only makes me love her more.

  I also don’t know if I can hold it against Jude. I knew he was no angel back then – he’s even admitted as much to me, although he’s never fessed up to this moment with Becca. Maybe he doesn’t even remember it. Or maybe he’s ashamed it ever happened. All I know is that when we got back together, when he asked me to run away with him, all that was behind him. I haven’t had a reason to doubt him since on that front.

  ‘You OK?’ Becca says after we finish hugging.

  ’Yeah,’ I say.

  The PE teacher comes up to Becca again then, asking her something about more plastic wine glasses. She rubs my arm and gives me a wink to let me know she’ll be back shortly, then scurries off to rummage through a few cardboard boxes they’ve got hidden under a table.

  I see there’s a pause in the signing frenzy and Dan is on his own. I decide to congratulate him quickly before I head home. I didn’t intend to stay even this long, and I don’t think it’s a good idea we spend much time together at the moment, at least not until I get my head straight about him. I squeeze my way between some people and slip over the to small table he’s sitting at.

  He smiles at me as I approach. ‘It was wonderful,’ I say. ‘I was spellbound.’

  I see the compliment sink in. I see it means something to him. ‘Thank you,’ he says.

  I open my mouth to take my leave, but Becca rushes over, her mobile in her hand. She brandishes it at us. ‘That was the babysitter. She says Chloe woke up and is crying the house down, so I’m going to shoot off…’ She glances at the PE teacher. ‘I’m sure Kiera is more than capable of holding the fort.’

  Dan stands up. ‘Do you want me to go with you?’

  Becca shakes her head. ‘No. This is your night. You make the most of it.’

  ‘OK.’ He leans across and kisses her on the cheek. ‘I won’t be too late.’

  ‘Sam said he was going to drag you down the Three Compasses afterwards,’ Becca
says, tapping a finger against his chest, ‘and you’re under strict instructions to let him!’

  He grins at her and kisses her again, on the mouth this time. I look away.

  Becca starts to head off then turns around. ‘Oh, I’m taking the car,’ she adds, ‘Poor Melanie was beside herself, so I’d better nip back as fast as I can.’

  Dan shrugs. ‘It’s OK. I’ll walk.’

  ‘It’s tipping down out there!’ Becca turns to me. ‘Maggie, you’ll give him a lift home, won’t you? After all, he can’t write his next blockbuster if he dies from the flu.’ She looks at me expectantly.

  ‘Of course,’ I say, because what else can I do?

  After Becca heads off, I keep busy by nominating myself Kiera’s second in command. I pour drinks, collect empty plastic cups from all around the bookshop, then help box everything up again. Anything to avoid being left alone with Dan.

  When Sam and his buddies drag Dan off to the pub to keep celebrating, I have to tag along too, but I keep on the fringes of the group. We find a large table and I chat to Sam’s wife, Geraldine. It’s weird; she was an acquaintance in my old life, but in this one we’ve never talked. I know all sorts of little details about her, but she knows nothing about me.

  However, when a group go off to buy another round and a gaggle of ladies head for the loos en masse, I find myself sitting at one end of the table with Dan the only person close enough to talk to.

  ‘How are things?’ he asks. ‘Jude doing well?’

  ‘We’re off on holiday soon, to Tahiti’ I say, thinking I sound like I’m having a conversation with my hairdresser, but maybe that’s a good thing.

  Dan studies me. ‘You don’t seem to be as excited as you should be about that. Everything OK?’

  The same old excuses are on the tip of my tongue, but the look in his eyes causes me to shelve them. ‘Things have been better,’ I say.

  ‘Between you and Jude?’

  I nod.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘You deserve someone wonderful, someone who would lay down his life to make you happy.’